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Corona Game

koronahra.cz

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Re: Corona Game

#11

Post by [deleted] »

yorwba wrote: post #4
freeone3000 wrote: post #3

"Masks, hands, distancing" somehow costs 498B? Luckily, after a spike of 200k cases a day for a couple of months, it seems most of the population dies or becomes immune, with 3.6M infections (14M including reinfections) and 200K dead by simulation end. Doing the bare minimum and letting the weak die on the streets led to a pretty decent life for the survivors.

According to the description of their economic model, "masks, hands, distancing" is a free option: https://koronahra.cz/about If you didn't do anything else, the 498B must be hospitalization costs. (Letting the weak die on the streets isn't an option, they'll go to the hospital and cost you.)

[deleted]

Re: Corona Game

#12

Post by scotty79 »

Got a very good result (bottom left corner of scatter chart at the end) by keeping masks on and banning risky businesses for the whole time and limiting events to 100 or 10 people and keeping schools closed until summer.

Probably wasted money on vaccine promotion. It didn't feel like a vaccine did much difference in such short time-frame and number of immune people rose super slow even towards the end.

When they extend the game till the end of 2021 and beyond vaccines may make huge sense.

Re: Corona Game

#13

Post by dalben »

blendergeek wrote: post #5

I don't like how there is no option for, "spend billions of dollars on buying enough rapid Covid tests to test every man, woman, and child in the country every single day". Given that rapid Covid tests cost about $5 a piece, this should be an economically feasible option that should be able to sharply reduce the spread of illness. Its too bad that nobody tried it in real life, or we would be able to see if it works.

I coordinated a testing center where we piloted antigen tests.

Antigen tests are less sensitive, applicable in a much more narrow time frame than PCR tests, and not as trivial to perform correctly as suggested in the media. On top of that, they can be sensitive to external factors as well (such as temperature swings for tests in storage, and fast expiration).

I dislike these antigen tests due to the false sense of security they give people. They have their uses, but they are not a substitute for PCR tests.

There's a reason why influenza antigen tests are not widespread.

Re: Corona Game

#14

Post by zupa-hu »

It's really cool, it's so powerful that it makes people realize the trade-offs.

The only problem is that in hindsight of course we can do pretty well. I guess most governments could do better after the fact. Too bad you can't play the future with random-generated possibilities. The fact that we don't know what's going to happen would make it in part more accurate.

Re: Corona Game

#15

Post by zuminator »

freeone3000 wrote: post #9
blamestross wrote: post #7

My takeaway: If you don't actually care about the death toll, do nothing until your population is about to rebel, turn on max restrictions until the spike falls, repeat. Minimizes costs, and it is low risk for the ruling class. If only we had handled it that well. Pandemics are great when your problem is a labor surplus. (hint: this is sarcasm)

One strategy I simmed was actually doing nothing -- the sim allows approval to dip to 12%, but then recovers naturally on its own with no intervention. 12% > 0%, so, no need to do anything.

I was able to similarly get pretty good final results by doing nothing all the way through the end of the first summer, then merely instituting masking in the fall through the winter. I refused all education campaigns but took foreign help when it was offered. Final death count was 141K but society stayed stable and at the end of the sim 4 million out of the (presumably) ~10.5 million population were vaccinated.

Re: Corona Game

#18

Post by regularfry »

Here's something that's been bugging me. The SIR (and SEIRS) model that this game is based on seem to me to have a flaw. Now obviously I'm not an epidemiologist, and I'm sure that epidemiologists have a good handle on this, I just don't know what it is.

The problem is this: if you assume an exponential decay, you're saying there's no point after infection at which the probability of transmission is zero. Probability of infection has a half-life in SIR. But for a virus like covid, we know that's not true: if you're infected, give it six weeks and you won't be infectious any more, one way or another. If you replace an exponential decay with a finite transmission lifetime, you do end up with different epidemic curves: they have steeper fall-off, for instance.

What's the reasoning here?

Re: Corona Game

#20

Post by ljf »

concordDance wrote: post #17

Doing absolutely nothing apparently leads to an infection fatality rate of 4%, which I'm extremely skeptical about.

While the figure for deaths isn't that high, not sure if the modelling of 'do nothing' would include the extra covid deaths due to overwhelmed hospitals?
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